by Jan Redford
“Okay, I’ll try again,” I slurred through the metal cable.
With my fingers crammed into the crack, I moved up the same three moves, but this time I managed to slot the stopper far above my head. I reached below me and pulled up the rope, clipped it into the carabiner.
“Yeah!” Rory hooted. “All right! Keep going!”
I leaned out from the face, with three fingers of each hand sunk up to the knuckles in the rock, the rubber of my shoes smeared on pebble-sized nubbins, and studied the crack. The belay ledge looked very far away.
I knew I could power over these hard moves—it was a short section—but could I stay in control of my fear all the way to the anchor? I was a sprinter, psychologically speaking, not a long-distance type.
A familiar tremor in my legs. I started my retreat.
“No, no, don’t come down!” Geoff said. He was getting tired of my waffling.
I stepped back onto the ground. Shook out my arms.
“You’re going to fry your fingers if you keep doing that,” Geoff said.
“No fucking kidding.”
My hormones were either raging with PMS or Brad-withdrawal. Maybe the problem was sex. Or the lack of it. I’d gone seven whole weeks without Brad, and now he and Dede were probably humping like rabbits all day and all night, like we used to.
I felt myself curl up inside. Those two had knocked something out of me and I didn’t know how to get it back.
“Jesus.” Geoff put his head in his hands, rubbed his forehead. The exhausting process of urging me up my leads was hard on my belayers, but Geoff was a psychologist. He should have been used to people like me.
Rage burned through me, at Geoff, at Brad, but mostly at myself. I knew I had to lead this route. Since I was no longer the girlfriend of an extreme whitewater kayaker, if I couldn’t climb, there was nothing setting me apart from any other waitress or tree planter or trail-crew worker. Climbing was all I had left.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I pounded on the rock with my fist, then kicked it till pain shot through my foot and snapped me out of my funk. Breaking my foot on the rock was not the way to get to the top of this climb.
Geoff and Rory snuck a look at each other. Geoff’s eyes rolled slightly.
“I saw that,” I said.
“Jan, just go for it. You’ve been climbing great. I know you can do it.” Rory’s gentle voice calmed me.
Facing the rock, I filled my belly with air, let anger balloon in me till there was no room left for fear. The trick was to use my anger and angst to get up the climb, not to let it deflate me.
With my fingers crammed into the crack, I climbed past my piece of protection, placed another stopper a few feet above the first, paused. My protection was good; it had slotted perfectly into the crack, so I was protected from a ground fall. I felt strong from kayaking all summer, from another trip to the Bugaboos before the Brad-Dede debacle. I knew I could do this.
I reached high, locked my fingers and powered through the hard moves, then slapped in another stopper, climbed past that protection and kept climbing. The hesitation was gone, but this wasn’t the Zen-like state of calm, control and quiet that other climbers seemed to achieve. I wasn’t “at one” with the rock. I was in a rage. Images ricocheted around in my head: Brad taking Dede down the river in a two-man kayak, chatting away, while I paddled my one-man kayak. I should have known. I’d been warned. Dede hadn’t been the first. She’d just been the first to replace me.
The crack widened to hand-sized, then wider, almost too big for my fists. It was not my favourite kind of climbing, but my momentum didn’t falter, even when I ran out of bigger pieces of protection and had to downclimb a few feet, retrieve my last piece, place it above my new piece, leap-frogging them up the crack. My life depended on two large pieces of metal and I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t want to die, necessarily, but I wanted to live a bit less now than I had before.
* * *
—
The campfire crackled and spluttered and bits of flaming wood popped out at the climbers sitting in the dirt, circled around the warmth. They were talking climbing. Miming climbing, more like it. They bounced off their butts, their scabbed-up hands gripping imaginary holds above their heads, their faces contorted into exaggerated expressions of terror.
“Shit, that second pitch was fucking awesome.”
“Did you see Ian cruise the crux of…”
“I had a manky finger lock and had to dyno for that jug…”
“And then I got a heel hook…”
One of the guys lifted a long leg, swathed in fluorescent green Lycra, to feign hooking his heel on a hold above his head.
Most of these guys were from Banff. The top rock climbers in Canada. I’d always hung out with the Calgary crowd, a more well-rounded bunch of climbers who wore cotton climbing pants, not Lycra. Who had professions and university degrees and long-term relationships. Some even owned houses. These Banff climbers didn’t seem to work very often. They just climbed.
I didn’t know where I fit in this world anymore. Maybe somewhere in limbo between the groups, because my life combined the least desirable qualities of both: I worked as little as possible, just long enough to qualify for unemployment insurance so I could climb or kayak; I wore red, disintegrating rugby pants, not Lycra; I had no profession, didn’t have a degree, didn’t have a home.
“Well, I think I’ll crash.” Geoff slapped his thighs and rose from his lawn chair.
Rory had retired to his tent ages ago to read. This was not his scene at all. He listened to classical music, wrote poetry, and spent his money on multivolume dictionaries. Geoff could fit in easily with these guys because he had a reputation as a hard climber. Rory was more an all-round mountain guy, a hiker and backcountry skier.
My can of beer was still half full, so I stayed at the picnic table. If I went to my tent too early, I’d be alone in the dark with my thoughts: of Dede strutting around my house in Brad’s clothes, cooking in my kitchen, sleeping with him in our waterbed. She didn’t even kayak or climb. But she was a lot of fun. Maybe that was the attraction. Someone who wouldn’t wave books like You and Your Pot Addiction in his face.
“Night.” A chorus went up around the fire as Geoff headed to his van.
With Geoff and Rory here I’d felt comfortable, but now I felt very single. I was too far away from the group around the fire, but I didn’t want to move closer. I was just about to stand and head to my tent when one of the Banff climbers, a big guy with neatly cut, wiry blond hair and the typical climber’s ape arms, got up and walked over to me. The black-and-white zebra stripes of his Lycra accentuated his massive quads. Skier’s legs. Most serious rock climbers tried to keep their legs skinny as kindling so they’d have less weight to haul up. He looked more like an alpine climber.
“Hey, Jan, right?” He stood awkwardly beside the picnic table. “My name’s Dan. Dan Guthrie.”
“Yeah, I remember.” He was one of the guys that had shown up at the cliff today to cheer me on.
“Mind if I sit? My butt’s going numb on the ground.”
Yes, I do mind, was what I wanted to say. I’d noticed him stealing glances this way and I was pretty sure he hadn’t been looking at Geoff.
“Go ahead.” I took out my pouch of Drum tobacco and rolling papers and started rolling a cigarette.
“Nasty habit.”
“Yup.” I ignored his attempt at humour. I didn’t feel like being nice to him. I wondered what he’d think if I’d stuffed a wad of Copenhagen into my lip instead of rolling a cigarette.
Licking the edge of the paper, I glanced at him. He was a good-looking guy. Big features, but not unappealingly so. White-blond hair. Blue, squinty eyes. Squinty in a nice way, as though he were looking into the sun. He was probably my age or a little older, which was too young for my taste. But what type of man was to my taste? Mildly abusive? Either too controlling or out of control. A sex addict?
My last annual trip to Ottawa had shed some lig
ht on my string of doomed relationships. My mother had sent me to her counsellor, who had handed me a list of characteristics of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic. I’d ticked every single box, except for the one about being super responsible, but one really stood out for me: ACOAs are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that the loyalty is undeserved. Further proof that I had to stay away from men.
“Nice lead on Sherri’s Crack today,” Dan said.
“Thanks.” I lit up my cigarette. A smidgen of pleasure crept in. I’d felt strong on that climb. Once I’d gotten off the ground. One of my hardest leads yet. Luckily, the Banff crowd hadn’t shown up until I was most of the way up and thus missed my rock-kicking hissy fit.
When the smoke hit my lungs, I coughed. It had been almost two years since I’d last smoked, since tree planting. I wasn’t sure why I was doing this to myself. Maybe it was the image. Tough. No one could hurt me. No one but myself.
“It’s a hard route,” Dan said.
I blew out a long stream of smoke. “Should I stick to the easier ones?”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant. It’s just…there’s not a lot of girls…er, women….It’s just…you looked really good.” I seemed to make him uncomfortable. I seemed to want to make him uncomfortable.
“So you just moved back to Canmore?” He probably already knew everything about me. There weren’t too many female climbers, especially single ones, and word got around quickly.
“Yeah, my boyfriend’s fucking my best friend so I didn’t have much choice.” I took a swig of beer and glared at him, like he was somehow responsible because he belonged to the wrong half of the human race. But the truth was, I fantasized more about strangling Dede than Brad.
“Gee, that’s too bad.” He looked at a loss for words. I felt a bit sorry for him.
“I’m crashing at a condo with Colin and Dave and Neil until I move in with Sharon.” Sharon was about to become the first North American woman on Everest, if all went as planned, so all these guys knew who she was. “Rafael had a wee fling in base camp so she kicked him out,” I added, choosing to ignore that fact that Colin, Dave and Neil had been betrayed too. By women.
“That’s weird. Seems to be an epidemic. My girlfriend started screwing around on me too. With some tubby bald dude.” He shook his head like he couldn’t believe she’d pick someone like that over him. I found it hard to believe myself. He really was quite cute. Like a little boy trapped in a big man’s body.
“I was just back from climbing in Squamish,” he said. “Driving down Banff Avenue, and there they were, kissing on the side of the road. What are the odds of that?”
He looked so sad I almost reached out to put my hand on his arm, but I took a drag off my cigarette instead. Encouraging him would do no one any good. He was a nice, decent guy. I’d been with a couple of nice guys before, including Rory, and it hadn’t worked out. But then again, it hadn’t worked out with the not-nice guys either.
We sat quietly for a moment. I forced myself not to fill the silence with inane chatter like I normally did.
“So, looks like we’re both single.” He grinned, revealing a chipped front tooth, the same side as mine. His blue eyes arched into dark crescents under white-blond eyebrows, and a dimple appeared in his chin.
“Yeah, and planning to stay that way.” I spat out a piece of tobacco. My cigarette seemed to be unravelling. “I’m taking a hiatus from men.”
After today’s climbing, I was starting to think the key for me was to stay single. The more angst-ridden I was, the better I seemed to climb.
“Can I give you a call when we’re back in Alberta?”
This guy was just not getting it. He was like a friendly St. Bernard who thought everyone liked slobber. How could he be so optimistic and upbeat while his girlfriend was fucking around with some little bald-headed guy?
“Probably not a good idea.”
“Well, where will you be working?”
“I might have a job waiting tables at the Rose and Crown.” Why was I telling him this?
“Too bad they get their dairy from the competition. I’m the Alpha milkman. You know, like the World’s Toughest Milkman.” He flexed his biceps and I could see them push against the fleece of his jacket.
I laughed, in spite of myself. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Like the comic strip. You’ve never heard of the World’s Toughest Milkman? I have a copy on the back of the toilet at my place.”
There was a steep climb with a big roof in Squamish called the World’s Toughest Milkman. When I’d led it a couple of years ago I’d hyperventilated with fear. Must have been named after the same comic.
“So you’re a milkman? For real?”
“Yeah, it’s a great job. Starts at five a.m., finishes by eleven. I climb the rest of the day and can still pay my mortgage.”
He has his own house?
I took another swig of beer and burped. Just a medium-sized burp, not an offensive one.
“That’s real ladylike.”
“Do I look like a fucking lady?” The words popped out before I could stop them. A harshness that wasn’t meant for him.
He watched me for a moment. “That guy sure did a number on you.”
My throat constricted and I took another drag, then rubbed my cigarette out with the heel of my sandal. If I started crying I’d never get to sleep and we were planning to do some hard routes on the Cookie Cliff in the morning.
When I looked back up, our eyes met. For several seconds, neither of us could look away. When we finally did, I felt like we’d shared something profound, but I had no idea why. He wasn’t even my type.
8
FRAGILE ICE
The snow had been trampled flat by dozens of ice climbers over the past couple of months, and my plastic mountain boots crunched with every step. Dan’s steady crunch crunch ahead of me sounded out of sync with my quick crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch. If I moved my legs any faster I’d be jogging. The Bow River, partially locked in ice, flowed beside us, and Mount Rundle rose above the trees to our right, streaked with vertical lines of frozen ice. No time to stop and enjoy the scenery. We had slept in, snuggled up in Dan’s bed, not wanting to go out into the crispy winter, so we were off to an “alpine start” at ten in the morning.
“Here we go!” Dan called back over his pack as he turned off the path and followed some footprints into the trees. The trail angled uphill here and soon we broke out into a gully, where we stood for a moment on snow-covered ice, water trickling deep below our feet. A hundred metres ahead we could see the first three tiers of the waterfall. The Professor Falls, named for the University of Calgary professor who had kept falling on the first ascent. We trudged to the base of the rock and stood under the first tier. Forty metres of blue frozen water, as though a fairy had waved a magic wand and turned it to ice mid-splash. It was steep. But I knew it wasn’t as steep as the pitch at the very top, the one we couldn’t see from here.
I’d had only one real season of ice climbing, mostly with Jim, and that was almost three years ago.
“Looks pretty steep,” I said.
“Ah, you’ll cruise it,” Dan said. “I solo this all the time. Best time was two hours and forty-five minutes from my door.”
“Jesus!” I looked at my watch. We’d left over an hour and a half ago.
“That was on a mountain bike,” Dan added.
We threw down our packs and pulled out the gear. I slipped into my harness and strapped my crampons to my boots. Dan clipped half a dozen ice screws to his harness and uncoiled the rope, then snapped on his foot fangs in half the time it took me to do up the leather straps on my metal crampons. Foot fangs were the new rage in the ice climbing community: metal points on a plastic base. They didn’t adjust to the size of my boots, though, because the outdoor industry still hadn’t twigged to the fact that women climbed mountains.
Dan had had a near-disaster with them the first time out. He’d come up here to solo Pr
ofessor on early-season ice, “a web of icicles and air,” as he’d described it, so thinly formed it barely held a person’s weight. Partway up, one of his new foot fangs popped off and he’d struggled to get it back on without falling. He knew he should have gone down, but he wanted to just look at the last crux pitch, and on the way, his foot fang had fallen off a second time. Another little hint that maybe he should retreat. But no, he’d decided to do the crux after all. The foot fang stuck it out for that pitch but fell off a half dozen more times on the descent. “Good thing it didn’t come off on the crux, though,” he’d said.
That had been only three months ago. He’d let me read the pages in his climbing journal: “I was going to dance my own ice dance by myself, a reflection of my personal state: climbing alone and sleeping alone.” His former girlfriend had moved in with that “tubby bald-headed dude,” and at that point I was still turning down his offers of dinner, or an ice climb, or a ski together at Lake Louise.
I unhooked my ice axes from my pack, old tools I’d bought second-hand a few years ago.
“I have a present for you.” Dan was vibrating with excitement, as though I’d just told him I had a present for him. He reached into his pack. “Your birthday present.”
“My birthday’s not till the end of the month.”
“I know. I’ll get you another one then.”
He handed me a brand new Stubai ice axe. It was made for technical ice, a huge improvement over my two clunkers. It was much shorter, with a steep, serrated pick that could dig easily into the ice, and a bent handle so you wouldn’t bash your knuckles. Big, ugly, bruised knuckles were the sign of an avid ice climber.
“I set the wrist loop up like mine,” he said. He’d slid an extra rainbow-coloured sling over the wrist loop to keep it from biting into my skin.
“Oh my God! These are over a hundred dollars!” My last paycheque at the restaurant had been $175 for two weeks, and tips had barely doubled that. I grabbed the tool and swung it above my head. “It’s beautiful!”
“I get a good discount.” Dan had given up his milk route for a job as manager of an outdoor store in Banff. “Do I get a kiss from my girl?”
